Eliza Sanders - examples of past works

MOTION POTERY - Interactive Poetry Podcast

Motion Poetry (2020) is series of interactive poetry podcast: a sharing of poetry that has been written by Eliza in response to live dance. Each session is delivered with gentle guidance to enable listeners to move creatively in response. They are designed so that all bodies and abilities can engage. It is not so much about inventing beautiful ‘dances’ as it is about enabling the body to feel available to movement as you listen. To enable a different experience of hearing by activating motion.

Each episode includes some context on the history of the poems/ the context and environments of writing, a gentle body warm up and a series of provocation for responsive movement. Followed by readings of a selection of poetry compiled within a different theme

Ep 1. Gravity

Ep. 2 Association

Ep. 3 Tension

Ep.4 Intuition

Listen HERE

Manage Your Expectations, 2024

Part dance theatre, part live improvisation, part performative lecture Manage Your Expectations takes the idea of the ‘trigger warning’ to its absurdist extreme using humour to question how ‘informed’ consent can really be and asking ‘How much do you really want to know?’

Created and performed by Eliza Sanders, Manage Your Expectations helps us to see the limits of the power to communicate, and our failures to say what we mean. Through a unique blend of dance, clown and absurd philosophising, performer and audience engage in a deeply imperfect exchange, musing on the influence of context, identity and personal history.

Selection of poems

From ‘e.motion - poems by and for the dancing body’

Zine 2018 (self published)

That Was Friday, 2022

Moulded from the experience of the queer, trans & culturally diverse team, That Was Friday layers dance, theatre and video in a theatrical collage of humans searching for home.

World premier season 23rd - 26th November 2022 Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra

Conceived by Charley Sanders and Eliza Sanders
Created and written by Charley Sanders, Eliza Sanders, Jack Sullivan and Amrit Tohari Agamemnoian with the ensemble

Images of ‘Silly Greatness’

Poem zine made during Movement Arts Practice (MAP) Reciprocal Residency

DANCE. DANCE. HAVE FEELINGS - 2021

Dance. Dance. Have Feelings is an entirely improvised, experimental, ensemble dance work. It is the first performance artefact of a dance improvisation method Eliza has been creating in collaboration with an ensemble of artists. The method aims to create entirely improvised works that sit within a predetermined aesthetic framework. The idea is to give freedom and agency to the performers while also expressing a delicately nuanced choreographic voice.

Testimonial from Dance + Writing workshop participant

‘Eliza’s practice is playful and sharp. With a very friendly environment she guides us through deep and thoughtful issues that reminds us that body, movement and language are not to be taken for granted.’

Womb Man - 2019

Womb Man is a durational dance installation piece, performed by Eliza Sanders in the Nishi Grand Stair. Over three hours a the ‘Womb Man’ grapples with her desire to nurture and to be nurtured in an increasingly unstable environment. Womb Man places the youthful female form in a strange and grotesque setting with elements that hint to sexuality, motherhood, nurturing and dependency. 

Womb Man was an Art Not Apart Festival Commision, 2020.